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Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum, British Museum - exhibition review

With more than 250 items — including erotic paintings and phallic trinkets, many never exhibited before — this brilliant and intelligent show paints a vivid picture of everyday life in the shadow of Vesuvius

Though a malevolent smoking menace in so many painted views of Naples, Mount Vesuvius is, as a mountain, not much more exciting than Parliament Hill on Hampstead Heath, and, as a volcano, is as disappointing as failure to achieve an orgasm. Tourists in their thousands wander disconsolately halfway around the rim of its crater, protected by a fence from falling in, and on reaching the barrier that prevents them from completing the circuit, retrace their steps with the sheepish grin that we adopt when pretending that failure is a matter of no consequence. Those who scan the crater in the hope of a wisp of sulphurous smoke see only bedraggled shrubs clinging to the slope; any who hope for the ruddy glow of lava streams will set up camp in vain.

In the 18th century Vesuvius was more obliging. The tourist then could indeed peer into the crater, see the cauldron bubble and occasionally tumble in, and some had the soles burned from their elegant shoes by the overflowing lava cooling from red to deceptive black, but by no means yet cool enough to walk on. Sir William Hamilton, notable volcanologist and the cuckolded husband of the notorious Lady Emma, lived nearby and was for ever installing gadgets to measure its emissions while she provoked emissions of another kind. The delicious frisson of fear that enchanted the tourist of that day was that Vesuvius might at any moment repeat the great eruption of August 24 AD 79 that overwhelmed, engulfed, destroyed and, paradoxically, preserved the nearby cities of Herculaneum, Pompeii and the more or less forgotten Stabiae.

Vesuvius then had been for many centuries a sleeping giant, its lower slopes fertile in the hands of farmers, the valley of the River Sarno below it (leading to the sea) a perfect place to build Pompeii, of which the earliest traces indicate foundation well before the sixth century BC. It was Etruscan and Greek before it became a Roman municipality — and indeed rebelled against Rome and was ruinously besieged by Sulla in 89 BC. In AD 62 an earthquake did significant damage to the city — perhaps the first indication that Vesuvius was waking — and 17 years later came catastrophe.

It is the daily life of Pompeii and its near neighbour Herculaneum before this disaster that is the subject of the British Museum’s latest exhibition. Every schoolboy knows the terrors of the eruption in AD 79 — the filthy, choking, killing cloud that fell upon the cities, burying them many metres deep, shattering their roofs but preserving their walls, the pyroclastic surges of super-heated gas killing their populations instantly, for these have long been repeatedly the subject of major international exhibitions, though not of this. Instead we glimpse the serenity of life among the wealthy and those who served their purposes in the years that frame the life of Christ (of whose influence here there is no evidence), and principally (we may reasonably presume) of the brief period between the earthquake and the eruption, when owners were much occupied with the rebuilding and redecoration of their properties.

It is thus an exhibition of the house and garden, the bedroom and the dining room, the kitchen, lavatory and bathroom and how and by whom these were used. The shop, the butcher and the baker are also in evidence, but the brothel and its various amusements (with which the Museo Nazionale in Naples makes much engrossing play in rooms that only adults may enter) is an absentee — here erotica resides everywhere throughout the house in amusing phallic trinkets, paintings and a garden sculpture of Pan sexually engaged with a she goat. Clearly the army joke that I heard in my National Service days — “Have you heard about old Ponsonby? He’s been cashiered for fucking a goat.” “Nanny goat or billy goat?” “Nanny goat of course — nothing queer about old Ponsonby” — was of remote classical origin and very stale. The disgusted should be immediately disarmed by the obvious affection of Pan (Faunus to the Romans, and guardian of crops), himself half-goat, for his distant relative rolling on her back in the missionary position. A plump Hercules emptying his bladder must be another antique joke — he is familiar from a Renaissance portrait (by Lotto), pissing into water in which Venus is bathing.

We must be serious (of course we must) about the Roman house and share the archaeologist’s glee in identifying the purposes of rooms, particularly of the cubiculum (plural cubicula), usually translated as bedroom (see cubicle in any decent English dictionary). Here the curator suggests that it could also be a dressing or bathing room, a library or study, even a room for conspiratorial or sexual assignation. Well yes, why not? — though I have to say that very quickly the thrill of this necessary chore wears thin and is soon done. The point is, I suppose, that in such an exhibition as this, constrained by the impossibility of conjuring the larger realities of the cities and their day, the curators must point to every peg, even the purpose of a room, on which we spectators may hang our hyperactive empathy, projecting ourselves into a distant time and place by feverishly contemplating every knick and knack that might function as a talisman. “Look upon this bauble and on this,” as Roger Fry as Hamlet might have said in such a circumstance, and divine all Herculaneum in a gold signet ring, all Pompeii in an earthenware chamber pot.

For me the greatest interest lies in the fresco paintings, for these, and the more or less contemporary coffin portraits of Greco-Roman Egypt, are all that we have to substantiate the extravagant claims made for the celebrated painters of antiquity — Apelles and his portraits of Alexander the Great, Parrhasius, whose painted curtain Zeuxis thought he should withdraw, and Zeuxis, painter of grapes so real that birds flocked to pluck them from the vine. These are all lost, but all were recorded by the elder Pliny, the historian and encyclopaedist who died observing Vesuvius bury Pompeii in its ash. There is nothing here, or in Naples, to suggest such skills in illusion. At best the paintings, in which archaeologists and art historians have sought to identify the hands of individual artists, workshops and phases of development, are, as it were, loosely impressionist, the touch light and flickering, but the drawing uncertain in any grasp of anatomy, form and action, and the range of quality below the best descends through what might be described as “popular” to crude ineptitude. The very best of figurative painting here is the single figure of Flora, seen from behind in lost profile, picking flowers for a cornucopia, and had I had my way I would have hung next to it the British Museum’s drawing of another Flora, much the same size, by Botticelli, for the comparison is revealing — they are so much the same in imagination, but the Botticelli is infinitely superior in realising it.

In portraiture there was, as in the best Egyptian coffin portraits, a level of observation, characterisation and immediacy that is beyond most portrait painters now, if compared with the annual prize exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. The Baker and his Wife (physical types still to be seen in Naples) are caught, not posing for the painter, but in a moment of total concentration, he holding a scroll that signifies some appointment or event important in a baker’s life, she, pensive, about to inscribe a tablet with a new recipe perhaps. By such depiction we are immediately transported a thousand miles and two millennia away to the Pompeii of the ancient Romans.

In sculpted portraiture nothing could be more convincingly true than the bronze head of Lucius Caecilius Iucundus, a local banker and businessman, with projecting ears and an ugly polyp on his cheek. He stands as a life-size herm, that is a head on a marble pillar, to which are appended dormant genitals, in bronze, hanging from a diamond plaque of pubic hair, perfectly placed, to our eyes destroying gravitas. Tumescent on a herm of Priapus standing in a garden, they were a prayer for fertility, but pendulous on a monument to one’s father, uncle or master (if the donor were a freed slave), what can the implication be?

The great surprise for most visitors must be the garden room (for want of a better name), a tiny cubiculum here expanded so that we may comfortably stand in it, as though in a real garden densely hedged about. It is the most extraordinary anticipation of the hortus conclusus, the closed garden of medieval imagery. In these high hedges shutting out the world, another world goes about its business — the business of the gardener who tied the climbing rose to its stake as we do now, who waters this dense fertility and sees to it that water bubbles in the fountain bowls and slakes the thirst of birds. And then there is the business of the birds themselves, the natives of Campania, as closely and accurately observed as any a millennium and a half later when, in the Renaissance and after, very similar studies were again made for scientific reasons. This beautiful room should surely inspire another Renaissance — a Roman revival in urban gardening to transform the meanest of open spaces.

The important distinctions between Pompeii and Herculaneum I must leave to the exhibition itself, and to the catalogue. This is much more a book, the book perhaps, encapsulating the latest research and opinions on these once living cities, invaluable in preparation for a visit there. Both it and the exhibition conclude with the events of August 24 AD 79, not with the customary high drama, but with pathos — the child who died running away, saved by neither the amulets and lucky charms that adorned her, nor by the tiny figure of Fortuna clutched in her hand, and the family smothered in ash when the roof of the cubiculum caved in. I am haunted by the dog rolling on its back as though in play, but truly in its death throes.